Mike & Sam Kinsel
A Florida couple with Schuylkill County roots, back home to save the church their community worshipped in for nearly ninety years.
Sam & Mike, Mount Carbon, 2026
We didn’t come here looking for a project. We came looking for a way back.
Sam was born and raised in Minersville, a few miles down the road from here. Her parents, Jackie and Bob Price, went to school in Minersville and Pottsville, and the family’s roots in Schuylkill County run generations deep. She left to study at Susquehanna University, earned her Doctor of Optometry at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, and practices optometry in Jacksonville, Florida today.
Mike was born in Houston and grew up in Jacksonville. He joined the United States Marine Corps in 2003 and served more than two decades as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician, ultimately with the 3d Marine Raider Battalion — his service has a section of its own below.
We live in Jacksonville with our four kids, and we’ve hosted short-term rental guests since 2019. When St. Francis de Sales came up for sale we were a thousand miles away, and the first thing we felt was not opportunity — it was that somebody ought to do something. This was the parish for this town. People were baptised here, married here, buried out of here, from 1921 to 2008. We bought it in December 2025 so the building would go the right way.
Neither of us is a preservation architect. We are two people with a lot of stubbornness, a camera, and a phone full of numbers for good local trades. We film almost everything, we get things wrong on camera, and we fix them on camera. We’re all about input — if you knew this church, or you know how a building like this ought to be handled, please tell us.
More than two decades in the Marine Corps
Mike enlisted in September 2003 and served as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician, ultimately with the 3d Marine Raider Battalion at Camp Lejeune. Across three continents he answered more than 150 emergency EOD calls, rendered safe roughly 75 improvised explosive devices, and is credited with saving the lives of 16 wounded people. He served on protection details for three U.S. Presidents and trained more than 8,500 military, law-enforcement and allied personnel.
Gunnery Sergeant Michael Kinsel, USMC
Jacksonville, Florida — with roots in Minersville and across Schuylkill County. Family within driving distance again.
Living in the front of the church, hosting guests in the back, keeping the building itself intact.
We’re applying to the National Register of Historic Places, and documenting the whole restoration on YouTube.
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